Faculty Profiles

Aeon J. Skoble

Professor Skoble is the author of Deleting the State: An Argument about Government (Open Court, 2008), the editor of Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty (Lexington Books, 2008), and co-editor of Political Philosophy: Essential Selections (Prentice-Hall, 1999) and Reality, Reason, and Rights (Lexington Books, 2011). Besides his academic work, he has frequently lectured and written for the Institute for Humane Studies and the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute. His main research includes theories of rights, the nature and justification of authority, and virtue ethics. In addition, he writes widely on the intersection of philosophy and popular culture, among other things co-editing the best-selling The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court, 2000).

Matthew R. Dasti

Professor Dasti's primary research interests center on the classical schools of Hindu philosophy. His general interests include epistemology, philosophy of religion, Chinese philosophy and ancient Greek thought. He has published in a number of journals and collections that include Apeiron, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophy East and West, and Asian Philosophy. He is co-editor of Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-author of The Nyāya-sūtra: Selections with Early Commentaries (Hackett, 2017).

William J. Devlin

Prof. Devlin's research interests focus on three areas of philosophy: (1) philosophy of science (including the realism-antirealism debate, scientific change, causality, and the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn), (2) continental philosophy (more specifically, 19th century philosophy, existentialism, and Friedrich Nietzsche), and (3) philosophy of popular culture (especially philosophy of film). His recent work includes a paper concerning Sartre's existential analysis of moral dilemmas (in the journal Film and Philosophy), the Philosophy of David Lynch, and the forthcoming volume in Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions-50 years on. He teaches classes in philosophy of science, existentialism, 19th century philosophy, Nietzsche, and logic. Dr. Devlin is on sabbatical Fall 2014.

Gal Kober

Professor Kober works and teaches primarily in applied ethics, with a focus on bioethics. Her research is centered on questions of autonomy and informed consent, with further interests in disability, economic justice, and scientific classification. Professor Kober’s doctoral work was in the philosophy of biology, focusing on the concept of species. Prior to coming to Bridgewater, she taught at Tufts University for four years. Between 2013 and 2015, Professor Kober was Edmond J. Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. She is currently an Ethics Associate and community member of the Boston Children’s Hospital Ethics Advisory Committee, and a member of the Community Ethics Committee at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School.

Laura McAlinden

Dr. McAlinden teaches courses in History of Modern Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, and Free Will and Determinism. Her main areas of research include Leibniz, Malebranche, and the metaphysics of causation.

James Pearson

James Pearson is the philosophy department’s specialist in analytic philosophy, an approach which focuses on scrutinizing the logic and language of philosophical arguments. His recent work has examined the history of explication, which is a process by which inquirers construct precise, new concepts to replace old, vague ones. He has published articles in such venues as The Monist, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice. In addition to teaching Symbolic Logic each semester, Professor Pearson offers classes in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and 20th Century philosophy.

Areas of Expertise

Epistemology, Metaphysics, History of Analytic Philosophy, Logic, Philosophy of Language and Mind

Catherine Womack

Dr. Womack's primary research is in the philosophy of public health and medicine. Her most recent articles are based on qualitative social science research on eating, agency, and social networks in collaboration with Norah Mulvaney-Day, PhD, of The Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research in Somerville, MA. She teaches a variety of Second Year Seminars based on that research, notably You Don't Want Fries with That: Food, Identity and Human Agency, and Issues in Global Public Health Ethics. In addition she teaches Philosophy of Mind and Language, Knowledge and Skepticism, Technology and Values, and Foundations of Logical Reasoning.

Degrees

BA, University of South CarolinaPhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Steven M. Sanders

Steven Sanders took early retirement at the end of 2003 to write full time. His recent publications include The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, The Philosophy of TV Noir (with Aeon J. Skoble), and the forthcoming Hitchcock as Moralist (with R. Barton Palmer) and The Philosophy of Michael Mann (with Palmer and Skoble).